Gwynnie’s wacky take on menopause
Love her or loathe her, actress Gwyneth Paltrow sure knows how to capitalise on her celebrity status
THE picture shows the bride looking out-of-her-skull happy, walking down the aisle with her grinning groom as guests shower them with organic confetti (aka petals and leaves). She’s wearing a backless, cap-sleeved Valentino gown, her hair cascading in beachy waves. He’s hunky in a designer suit.
It’s the first official picture of Gwyneth Paltrow’s wedding to TV writer, director and producer Brad Falchuk (47) – before all we’d seen were sneaky shots of famous guests coming and going, including Cameron Diaz, Jerry Seinfeld, Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jnr.
But here Gwynnie is, in all her ecstatic bridal glory. And the first place she posts the pic is – where else? – on the website for Goop, her wellness lifestyle brand.
“Took me a minute to get it together but at long last, for those who’ve requested it, a little look inside the best day of our lives,” she says in a follow-up Instagram post.
Thanks, Gwyneth! That’s great, and so inspirational – especially as, in the same week you released that picture, you revealed you’re in the throes of perimenopause. The message being: screw you hormones, you aren’t going to take any of the fun out of my life!
Gwyneth’s revelation that she’s on the cusp of the change comes via a video on – you guessed it – Goop. “I can feel the hormonal changes happening,” she says. “The sweating. The moods. You’re just like all of a sudden furious for no reason.”
But GP (as everyone at Goop calls her) thinks menopause “gets a really bad rap and needs to do a bit of rebranding”.
“I remember when my mother went through menopause it was such a big deal and I think there was grief around it for her and all these emotions. I don’t think we have, in society, a great example of an aspirational menopausal woman.”
No prizes for guessing who she has in mind.
At the age of 46 Gwyneth has “tweaked” her approach to fitness to include more
weight-lifting to build bone density, she writes on her site, adding, “I continue to eat as healthily as possible – whole foods, lots of green vegetables, clean sources of protein – particularly at lunch. Everyone needs off-the-leash time at night.”
It isn’t just about the diet and the exercise though. If you really want to slide effortlessly and gorgeously into middle age like GP you’re going to have to fork out for the stuff she’s taking: a brand-new range of supplements called Madame Ovary.
The supplements contain a mix of essential vitamins, herbs, phytonutrients and adaptogens to combat menopause meanies such as hot flushes, vaginal dryness and stress-related fatigue.
“We at Goop wanted to create the Madame Ovary protocol because there aren’t a lot of products being made for us to really help us through that phase,” she says. “Surrounding yourself with love and the right amount of self-care is always the way forward.”
But self-care doesn’t come free: getting in on the Madame Ovary action costs $90 (about R1 300) a month. Still, if history is anything to go by, Goop fans will go for it. Because no matter how bad a rap the stuff the site advocates gets, the faithful just can’t stay away. And the curtain-haired guru behind it all is smiling serenely all the way to the bank.
Earlier this year Goop was forced to pay $145 000 (just more than R2,1 million) after doctors branded several products for sale on the site as “ridiculous and dangerous”, and a California court agreed.
Among them was the vaginal jade egg Goop claims can do everything from regulate hormones to help with bladder control. Then there was the inner-judge flower essence blend, a concoction that can apparently help ward off depression.
With a reported value of $250 million (R3,6 billion), Goop wasn’t hurt much by the fine – and what’s more, the empire took little heed of the legal slap on the wrist. The down-there egg and the happy flower essence blend are still for sale.
Among other wonderful items Goop also sells psychic vampire repellent, a “sprayable elixir” that will banish bad vibes through the use of “gem healing”.
One of Goop’s most outspoken critics is US gynaecologist Jen Gunter who’s often taken a few of the more outlandish claims and “cures” made on the site to task. She doesn’t mince her words. “Tampons aren’t vaginal death sticks, vegetables with lectins aren’t killing us, vaginas don’t need steaming and for f**k’s sake, no one needs to know their latex farmer. What they need to know is that the only thing between them and HIV or gonorrhoea is a few millimetres of latex. So glove that f**ker up.”
GWYNETH (who says she’s tried most if not all of her goodies and is a fan of intimate steaming) is unlikely to care much about the critics. Ridicule her all you want, she’s onto a winner. US journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner describes Goop as “a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking” and fans can’t get enough of it. Negative press only seems to lure more people to the site: there are more than 2,4 million unique visitors to Goop each month.
The site – which started out as a newsletter Gwyneth sent out from her kitchen with recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins – is now, as Taffy points out in The New Yorker, “a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer, a portal of health-and-healing information and a TV show”.
“There’s no part of the self that Goop doesn’t aim to serve,” she says.
Love her or loathe her, you have to take your hat off to Gwyn. She launched Goop in 2008 at the height of the global economic crisis and turned it into a major player. And she did so by being totally unapologetic about its in-your-face elitism.
“It’s crucial to me that we remain aspirational,” she told students at Harvard Business School last year. “Our stuff is beautiful. The ingredients are beautiful. You can’t get that at a lower price point. You can’t make these things mass market.”
In other words, just because you may not be able to afford the things she bangs on about doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to look at them and want them.
Nothing she does is clickbait, GP says – it’s more about creating “cultural firestorms” to drive traffic to her website so she can “monetise those eyeballs”.
“It’s always a cultural firestorm when it comes to a woman’s vagina.”
And now we have Madame Ovary. Menopause, you’ve been warned.